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What’s the best way to navigate competitive forces?

Eric Ries (Author, The Lean Startup) The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful BusinessesSooner or later, a successful startup will face competition from fast followers. If a competitor can out execute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can. A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode—away from customers—is unlikely… (read more)

Sam Altman (President at Y Combinator) Startup Playbook99% of the time, you should ignore competitors. Do not worry about a competitor until they are beating you with a real, shipped product. In the words of Henry Ford: “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. “

Michael Porter (Professor, Harvard Business School) The Five Competitive Forces That Shape StrategyDeliberately choose a different set of activities to deliver a unique set of value or choose to perform activities differently than your rivals.

Michael Porter (Professor, Harvard Business School) The Five Competitive Forces That Shape StrategyTo limit the threat of substitutes, offer better value through wider product accessibility. Soft-drink producers did this by introducing vending machines and convenience store channels, which dramatically improved the availability of soft drinks relative to other beverages.

Michael Porter (Professor, Harvard Business School) The Five Competitive Forces That Shape StrategyTo temper price wars initiated by established rivals, invest more heavily in products that differ significantly from competitors’ offerings.

Peter Thiel (Co-Founder & Partner at Founders Fund) Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 3 Notes EssayIn perfect competition, no firms in an industry make economic profit. If there are profits to be made, firms enter the market and the profits go away. If firms are suffering economic losses, some fold and exit. So you don’t make any money. And it’s not just you; no one makes any money. In perfect competition, the scale on which you’re operating is negligible compared to the scale of the market as a whole.

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder & Chairman & CEO at Facebook) How To Get Ahead: Entrepreneurial Lessons From Mark ZuckerbergWe had this concept that we actually still have in the company today, called lockdown. Which is — whenever any other company got ahead of us on something that we thought was strategic to us, we literally did not leave the house until we had addressed the problem. Now it’s a little looser of an interpretation. We don’t literally lock everyone inside the office, but about as close to that as we can legally get.

Seth Godin (Founder at Yoyodyne Entertainment) Seth’s Blog: What are you competing on?What are you competing on? It’s pretty easy to figure out what you’re competing for—attention, a new gig, a promotion, a sale… But what is your edge? In a hypercompetitive world, whatever you’re competing on is going to become your focus.In any competitive market, be prepared to invest your heart and soul and focus on the thing you compete on. Might as well choose something you can live with, a practice that allows you to thrive.

Paul Graham (Co-Founder & Partner at Y Combinator) Startup Investing TrendsWe currently advise startups mostly to ignore competitors. We tell them startups are competitive like running, not like soccer; you don’t have to go and steal the ball away from the other team. But if idea clashes became common enough, maybe you’d start to have to. That would be unfortunate.

Dharmesh Shah (Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot) Happy Birthday HubSpot! 9 Lessons From Our First 9 YearsDon’t obsess over competitors. Obsess over customers. I’ll confess. I’m likely more guilty of watching our competitors too closely than anyone at HubSpot. But, the good news is that though I watch them closely, I try not to follow them. Knowing what your competitors are up to is good. Doing what your competitors are up to is bad.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Some Lessons From Vine – AVCOnce again, it appears that the category creating innovator isn’t hurt too badly when the bigger and more popular social platform copies their signature feature in their product. We have seen this before with Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Facebook and many other similar situations.

Clayton Christensen (Author, The Innovator’s Dilemma) a16z Podcast: Disruption in Business… and Life by a16z | Free Listening on SoundCloudManagement goes on to believe that their product is about features. When you start up, you have an insight about a job that needs to get done. You respond to that passive data to develop a product. But then as a company goes on to be successful the nature of the data is very active. Management loses their insight about the job [that they help a customer accomplish] and now they believe their business is about products and features. Put out all of… (read more)